VRML earns ISO's blessing

Government employees who assisted in the birth of the Virtual Reality Modeling Language in 1994 are surprised by how fast VRML grew up.

Last December, the language received the blessing of the International Standards Organization as VRML97.

"We're all very happy," said Don Brutzman, assistant professor in the interdisciplinary academic group at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, Calif. Brutzman sits on the board of directors of the nonprofit VRML Consortium and is a technical adviser.

"ISO streamlined the process, and we were a test case to see how responsive ISO could be," he said.

In 1994 "a couple of people had the idea that 3-D was compatible with the World Wide Web," Brutzman said. "Within a year, we had a VRML 1.0 specification. In the second year, we had VRML 2.0. The third year, we polished and renamed it VRML97, and it became an international standard."

The next step--development of validation test suites for VRML browsers--is up to the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

Government engineers who work on advanced technical projects have struggled for years with incompatible 3-D formats, Brutzman said. The ISO-standard VRML interchange format can map to any of the common 3-D graphics software formats, and it also works for embedded animation and Java and JavaScript programming.

"It used to be if you wanted to show somebody 3-D, that person would have to have the same program and usually the same computer type, or he couldn't see it," Brutzman said.

Government interest in VRML is widespread, Brutzman said, especially at the Defense Modeling and Simulation Office and the Naval Undersea Warfare Center. Decentralized training, scenario walk-throughs, virtual flybys and tactical visualizations are all practical applications for 3-D graphics.

"The government doesn't have these capabilities yet, but there appear to be no technical impediments to doing a lot of amazing things," he said.

VRML proponents want to see 3-D Web pages become as ubiquitous as two-dimensional pages written in Hypertext Markup Language.

"We have a stable specification, and we're starting to see a big burst in authoring tools," Brutzman said.

Users are watching to see whether authoring tool companies can bring 3-D graphics out of the high-end niche and into the mainstream so that anybody could create realistic scenes.

"Our metric for success will be if it's as easy as building a Web page," Brutzman said. "I think we're there."

Netscape Communications Corp. and Microsoft Corp. have added native VRML to their browsers. Interest in VRML comes from big hardware companies such as Apple Computer Inc., IBM Corp. and Intel Corp., as well as some smaller software companies such as Intervista Software Inc. of San Francisco; 3Dlabs Inc. of San Jose, Calif.; and S3 Inc. of Santa Clara, Calif.

"It's a snowball rolling down a hill," Brutzman said. "We're gaining players and gaining speed as we go."

At the Naval Postgraduate School, Brutzman and fellow computer scientists are pushing their research into networked virtual worlds. Using the Defense Department's Distributed Interactive Simulation protocol, "we're implementing DIS in Java to talk to VRML," he said.